Baby V.O.X

Baby V.O.X is an acronym for the “Baby Voices of Xpression”). They were one of the South Korea’s girl groups that is under the management and record company of DR Music. Even though they had initially much internal turmoil, the group was eventually a consistent group from the year 1999 to 2005 as they released their hit songs and albums.

But things do not go as they planned when their last album Ride West was said to be a failure. By the end of that year, all of the members of the group had left their company with some of them will be going solo and the others will be moving to other entertainment areas. The group’s 7th album and last album, Ride West was released in April, 2004 which featured songs in different languages such as in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korea. There are also some appearances of well known hip hop artist such as Tupac Shakur and Jennifer Lopez were featured on the album. Event though Tupac’s appearance in it was a freestyle rap that has been recorded in prison, the group had attempted to start promotions in USA in the year 2004. However, even the rights for the sample of Tupac’s verse are not cleared, this caused in a court case that was pursued by the late rapper’s mother, Afeni Shakur. The album was then proclaimed to be the one who had sent the group in the international awareness, even though they are suing English in the single. On the other hand, the music video for the album had featured, “Xcstasy” that was in English language and features expensive luxury vehicles and well-dressed, high preened divas that serves the emulation of the “bling bling” style of hip hop videos that is popular in the United States during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The group had also performed some sexy dance moves and even wore provocative dresses in the music video, seen as a little too much for the conservative country of Korea. This was released with very much controversy. There was the first issue about their managing group; DR Music can legally use Tupac’s material in the recording with the singer’s representative saying that DR did not have any authorization. Although the group had claimed that they have the rights on it, many different companies in the USA had claimed the authorization and the problems were not solved. To worsen the problem, a member of the Korean hip hop group DJ DOC was offended by their alleged misuse of Tupac Shakur’s lyrics, said it to the media and called the group members as prostitutes. There is a second single called “Play Remix” that features Jennifer Lopez was promoted for a short time but the sales were lower than those of their previous ones. After the year 2004, the group had gone into hiatus and Shin Eun Jin and Yoon Eun Hye had left the group in the year 2005. In March, 2006 the group was officially disbanded.